Tagish Lake, 2000
A fireball seen by satellites that dropped some of the most fragile meteorites known.
Key facts
- When
- 18 January 2000, early morning local time
- Where
- Over northern British Columbia and the Yukon, Canada
- What hit
- a meteoroid about 4 m across
- Era
- The sensor age, 2000 onwards
- Location
- 59.70° N, 134.20° W
About 1.7 kilotons of TNT.
About a tenth of the Hiroshima bomb.
What happened
Just after dawn on a cold January morning, a fireball lit up north-western Canada and burst high in the air. US satellites designed to watch for explosions recorded the flash, and the event was also heard across the region.
A week later, a local man found black, crumbly stones lying on the frozen surface of an arm of Tagish Lake. He picked them up without touching them with bare hands and kept them frozen, which turned out to be enormously valuable to science.
Tagish Lake is a carbonaceous chondrite unlike any other, rich in carbon, water-bearing minerals and organic molecules. It is so fragile and porous that very few such meteorites survive to reach the ground.
Effects
None on the ground beyond the scattered stones. The airburst was strong enough to be felt by some witnesses.
The evidence
Satellite data, infrasound records, eyewitness photographs and the recovered meteorites.
Did you know?
Some of the first Tagish Lake stones have never been allowed to thaw, keeping their most fragile compounds intact.
Its colours in sunlight suggest it may come from a dark type of asteroid in the outer belt.
Related pages
How is impact energy measured? See energy explained, or try the impact calculator.